Making Sense, Epistemic Agency and Critical Inquiry in Science Education

This paper starts from a premise that many of the fundamental concepts that students are required to ‘make sense of’ are unnatural. For example, everyday experience will not lead to the idea that the Earth is a sphere or that the Continents were once one. Moreover, many of the ideas of science require representations which are either abstractions – for instance, heat and temperature – or entities which are too small to see or too large to imagine. Pedagogies based on the ideas of direct teaching and explanation have been shown to be ineffective. Rather research shows that more effective pedagogies are interactive and dialogic. Some argue that this requires students to be “doers of science” enabling students to be epistemic agents. While we recognize the pedagogical value of dialogue, we question the extent to which students are able to direct their own learning in interactions with peers. In our view, effective dialogue should both reveal and challenge students’ thinking by questioning their core assumptions. Such dialogue is difficult to achieve by interaction with peers, as peers lack disciplinary expertise and pedagogical knowledge needed to challenge common-sense assumptions about the world. Instead, we propose a dialogue led by trained teachers who know how to enact an informed critique of student ideas. Such dialogue places students in a position where they can recognize their errors progressively in their reasoning while also regulating the emotions associated with being wrong. We illustrate our ideas by presenting an approach to class discussion, called Socratic Challenge, and use examples drawn from a range of sources and discuss the implications for the teaching of science.